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Planckian selected among 13 firms for EuroHPC’s quantum computing push

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September 16, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Pisa-based quantum technology firm Planckian will receive 300,000 euros after being selected as one of 13 companies participating in the EuroHPC Quantum Grand Challenge, and the only firm chosen from Italy. The European Union initiative aims to identify companies with viable plans to deliver fault-tolerant quantum computers, with Planckian focusing on reducing the infrastructure costs that hinder scaling.

“The Quantum Grand Challenge signals that Europe is not only leading quantum research, but is serious about turning that research into machines that the industry can actually buy and run,” says Planckian CEO Michele Dallari. Through its SQALE project, the company, a 2023 spin-off from the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore, will develop a technical and financial roadmap for its superconducting qubit architecture, designed to share control lines between qubits and lower system costs.

Planckian Selected for EuroHPC’s Phase 1 Quantum Challenge

The company is the sole Italian participant among the thirteen firms chosen from a pool of twenty-seven proposals across Europe. This initial phase will provide Planckian with funding to refine its approach to overcoming infrastructure limitations in quantum computer construction.

The core challenge Planckian addresses is the escalating infrastructure overhead associated with scaling superconducting processors; traditional designs necessitate dedicated control lines for each qubit, a configuration that quickly becomes economically unsustainable as qubit counts increase. Planckian’s architecture differs by enabling multiple qubits to share control lines, a design intended to facilitate scalability toward commercially viable, utility-scale machines.

The company’s SQALE project, funded through this phase, will detail the steps needed to achieve a fault-tolerant, industrial-scale system, the company says. “That is the problem we set out to solve.

Our approach enables scalability by design and changes the economics of large-scale machines, bringing them within the reach of industrial and market R&D budgets, rather than relying on national programmes alone.” Successful completion of Phase 1, expected to span four months following grant agreement finalization, will qualify Planckian to compete for up to EUR 30 million in funding from the European Investment Bank during Phase 2.

The Quantum Grand Challenge signals that Europe is not only leading quantum research, but is serious about turning that research into machines that the industry can actually buy and run.

Michele Dallari, CEO of Planckian
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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